Gil Shaham often tells his children to take risks, try new things and not be afraid of making mistakes. But the renowned violinist realized a few years ago that he had not done a very good job of following his own advice, so he decided to break out of his comfort zone and develop an innovative twenty-first-century way to present Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin (BWV 1001-1006).

“I think of this as a little bit of maybe practicing what I preach,” he said.

Shaham teamed with New York video artist David Michalek, who has created a group of short films to be projected on a screen behind the violinist as he performs the six works. The resulting multimedia collaboration will make its debut during a national tour timed to coincide with the 10 March 2015 release of Shaham’s recording of the complete Bach set on his Canary Classics label. The tour began 1 March 2015 in Chicago as part of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Symphony Center Presents series, continues in late March in California, and concludes 23 April 2015 with a performance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“I hope people come to see it with an open mind,” Shaham said. “Some of the images will surprise people. Some might shock people. But I found them to be mesmerizing and beautiful and very, very musical.”

Michalek has gained international attention for his multifaceted body of work, which includes large-scale outdoor installations, in which he projects super slow-motion films on giant screens. These projects have been shown in such high-visibility sites as Lincoln Center, Trafalgar Square, and Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin. Among the best-known such works is Slow Dancing, which consists of forty-three video portraits of dancers and choreographers from around the world. Each subject was filmed using a high-speed, high-definition camera that records one thousand frames per second compared to the standard thirty frames. Because the resulting videos last ten minutes but show only five seconds of action, the movement is barely perceptible.

The artist has continued his extreme slow-motion techniques for this project, finding thematic links to Bach’s works without trying to specifically interpret them. The challenge was to create images for music never intended for such purpose and to make sure the two mediums complemented each other. Michalek asked himself such questions as: “What does it mean to couple this kind of pure music with an image? What can an image do? What can it do advantageously? What can it do problematically?”

Some experts believe the three pairs of sonatas and partitas relate to the New Testament stories of Christ’s Nativity, Passion, and Resurrection. Rather than attempting to directly depict the first of those, for example, Michalek chose to suggest new life by filming a budding six-year-old violinist playing her instrument, zeroing in on her face and tiny fingers. “That’s all it is,” he said. “That’s the image. So, while we hear Gil onstage, playing the heights of violin music, we see a little being on screen holding the same instrument.” For another section, he created a kind of filmed still life, with a crystal ball, skull, and just the movement of sand slowing dropping through an hourglass.

Like Bach’s six Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12), the composer’s 1720 works for solo violin are considered among the most profound and expressive statements ever written for the instrument. Out of respect, Shaham postponed taking them on until about ten years ago, when he finally began performing them in public. “And then I learned what so many other musicians have said before – that there is really no greater joy than playing Bach,” he said. “When I go to my practice room, I’ll start practicing, and the time will just pass. Suddenly, it’s two hours later.”

As part of his activities while serving as the 2013-14 artist-in-residence with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, he performed Bach’s solo violin works as part of three chamber-music programs. Because the ensemble is one of two orchestras that operate under the auspices of the Bayerischer Rundfunk, Shaham decided to take advantage of its easily accessible recording studios and engineers to record the set last summer. “It seemed like a good moment to do it,” he said.

The album will be the fourteenth release by Canary Classics, the label Shaham founded in 2003 as a way to have the freedom to record what he wanted without the commercial pressures associated with larger labels. It has since issued recordings featuring the violinist’s sister, pianist Orli Shaham, and his wife, violinist Adele Anthony. “It’s sort of a small family business,” the violinist said. The label was begun with a simple business plan: use the proceeds from the last recording used to pay for the next. “I feel very lucky that so far we’ve been able to do that.”

A big surprise for the violinist’s longtime fans is that he has brought a lighter-sounding, period-performance approach to his playing of the Bach solo Sonatas and Partitas. “I feel like now is probably the most rewarding time ever to be studying Bach, to be playing Bach, to be listening to Bach, because we have had so much research about it, and so, for example, I love the recordings of (Dutch conductor) Ton Koopman (and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra) of the Orchestral Suites (BWV 1066-8). So, I began experimenting. I guess it’s part of my mid-life crisis.”

To play these works, he reconfigures his 1699 Stradivarius with a baroque-style bridge made by New York luthier Adam Crane and gut instead of the usual steel strings, and he employs a Baroque-style bow commissioned from New York bow maker Markus Laine. At the same time, Shaham has incorporated such period-performance practices as less vibrato and faster tempos. “Some people have been surprised at my tempi, and I understand that. I certainly am playing much of this music faster than I used to, and I’m convinced for now that I’m happier with it.”

As he delved into Bach’s solo Sonatas and Partitas, Shaham said the spirit of experimentation in the music rubbed off on him and he began thinking about possible new ways to present this music. He realized today’s audiences do not understand many of the cultural references that would have come naturally for Bach’s contemporaries, such as what a bourrée is and how the music for it sounds.

So he wanted to provide new entry points into these works for twenty-first-century audiences. That’s when he thought of Michalek’s installation, Slow Dancing, which he saw in the Lincoln Center Plaza in 2007 and realized might be just the vehicle he was looking for. “I thought the way he shot his films was so beautiful, and especially the way he used time, the play with light and time, and I thought that could easily lend itself to music.”

The two first met at Café Luxembourg, near Lincoln Center, and quickly hit it off. It helped that Michalek was a fan of Bach and owned several recordings of the solo violin works. They later got together for further discussion at Michalek’s apartment, with the two of them sitting on the floor of the artist’s little library – Shaham breaking down the structure of the sonatas and partitas and playing examples on his violin, and Michalek showing excerpts from his other works. Soon their collaboration was firmly under way.

As an outgrowth of projects like Slow Dancing, Michalek does commissioned family portraits using a similar slow-motion technology. One day, he visited a client’s house, where one of his filmed diptychs of boys ages six and eight happened to be running at the same time that a recording of cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing a Bach solo suite was playing. To the artist, it appeared that the boys were having a response to the music he was hearing, and watching them and listening at the same time enhanced his appreciation of the music.

“It didn’t seem to damage to music,” he said. “It didn’t seem to fight with it. It was just a very simple mechanism that allowed me to get into a sort of state of active listening that I could sustain. Not that I can’t sustain it without the image. But it helped me do it differently, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe this is a way in.’”

Michalek set about creating short slow-motion videos to accompany each section of the six Bach works. The high-definition videos will be projected behind Shaham on screens that will vary in size depending on the venues where he performs. Michalek’s technical director will travel with the violinist and oversee the presentation of the visual imagery, which has to be manually queued to the duration of the violinist’s playing.

In all, the artist shot more than two hundred fifty takes, and he spent recent weeks deciding on which ones to include in the work. Shaham finally had a chance to see the final product earlier this week, and he called it stunning. “I feel very honored to be part of David’s vision in this project,” he said. “I think it’s a testament to Bach that the power of his music transcends centuries and cultures and mediums and inspires people.”

Instead of a children’s chorus sailing over the top of the grand double-choir interchange, adult operatic voices among the vocal soloists will be in their place. During recitatives, the typical harpsichord won’t be heard.

Who is responsible for these hard-to-explain decisions?

The chorus’ namesake, Felix Mendelssohn, who rescued the St. Matthew Passion from roughly a century of obscurity in 1829 with a performance adjusted to his nineteenth century, as opposed to Bach’s eighteenth.

“It’s still a beautiful artistic gesture,” said longtime Mendelssohn Club music director Alan Harler, who is retiring at the end of this season. “If you can change your thinking . . . and listening, we’re replicating a version that was more about how people in the Romantic period heard this music.”

Though Mendelssohn was used to hearing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93) played among his ultra-literate family for recreational purposes, the rest of the world had changed so much that, while planning his St. Matthew Passion performance, he was told the audience would never sit through anything so long – about three hours – and complicated.

“At some point, somebody would have rediscovered the St. Matthew Passion and performed it,” said Mendelssohn scholar R. Larry Todd at Duke University. “But you had to have . . . somebody who could pull it off, musically speaking. And Mendelssohn was wired for Bach.”

The famous 1829 Berlin performance, conducted by a then-twenty-year-old Mendelssohn, cut roughly half the piece. Harler wouldn’t touch that version, opting for the 1841 Leipzig edition, which restored many cuts.

“This version is a whole and complete work of art,” Harler said. “I have to believe that. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this.”

The evolution from 1829 to 1841 leaves even the brightest scholars a bit baffled. In the earlier outing, Mendelssohn used keyboard accompaniment for the recitatives – not the kind of instrument Bach would have known, but still closer than the two cellos and a bass accompanying the recitatives in 1841, when Mendelssohn presumably had a greater understanding of the piece. And though he probably could have had a children’s choir in that second performance, Mendelssohn chose to stick with the 1829 Berlin approach of having the vocal soloists sing their part.

Roughly forty-five minutes of the piece were still missing in 1841, and theories abound as to what guided that cutting process. Some say Mendelssohn, born Jewish but a Lutheran convert, was on the lookout for anything that smelled of anti-Semitism. A more subtle theory suggests that a more emotional experience, as opposed to the old idea of faith as an act of self-discipline, guided the cuts. In any case, the version is rather less reflective.

A longtime admirer of the St. Matthew Passion, Harler was drawn to the Mendelssohn edition because it allows the large choral forces of his 140-voice Mendelssohn Club – as opposed to the much smaller, historically accurate performances now championed by Choral Arts Philadelphia.

Only in recent years, though, were scores and parts published that made modern performances even possible – which explains why Sunday’s performance is the U.S. premiere of the Mendelssohn version. To better understand Mendelssohn’s journey with the piece, Harler traveled to Oxford, England, to examine his original score, urged on by his Bach advisor, Koji Otsuki, who studied with the famous Japanese Bach specialist Masaaki Suzuki. “It’s really important to see what Mendelssohn thought, what he really wanted to do and, in the end, what he accomplished,” he said.

Studying such documents is a highly intuitive process; what one learns from them can’t always be articulated. One thing Harler observed, though, was the care taken with modifications, often delineated in the lightest of pencil marks – gray for 1829, red for 1841. Perhaps Mendelssohn knew that Bach would have to adopt outer garments that didn’t entirely fit until succeeding generations became more accustomed to his works – and more curious about what they originally sounded like.

“I think Mendlssohn understood the sweep of the piece,” Harler said, “even if having one hundred forty singers makes a racket that Bach never would have heard.”

The event has turned into a major opportunity for the Mendelssohn Club: The group received its largest-ever grant – $240,000 from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage – including money for a documentary film on the subject.

Ward Swingle, who died on 19 January 2015 at age 87, was the founding father of the Swingle Singers, the a cappella group that blended jazz rhythms with Baroque and classical music in a distinctive, easy-listening style. The group made its name with scat renditions of Bach: lots of “doob-a-do” and “bah-bah-badah” substituting for the keyboard strokes more commonly heard in works such as The Art of Fugue (BWV 1080).

Critics could be wary. “The history of pop music is littered with jazzed-up versions of the classics,” sniffed The Times after they packed the Albert Hall in April 1965, before conceding that some people “truly find that the music’s enjoyable qualities profit by being brought up to date”. Others believed that in the same way that Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey introduced many people to Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, so Bach with a swing was an enticing introduction to Johann Sebastian’s carefully knitted counterpoint.

Not only did Swingle and his minstrels receive endorsement at the box office, major classical names such as John Barbirolli, Yehudi Menuhin and Glenn Gould offered their backing. George Malcolm, the renowned harpsichordist, shared the stage with them at the Festival Hall in 1966 in a program entitled “Jazz Sébastien Bach,” which was also the name of their first album.

Meanwhile, contemporary composers came calling. Luciano Berio wrote his colorful and noisy four-movement Sinfonia for the Swingle Singers, which they premiered with the New York Philharmonic in 1968 and performed at the Proms in 1969, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer.

Ward Lemar Swingle was born on September 21 1927 in Mobile, Alabama, where, he once said, the sounds of New Orleans float along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. He took to the piano from an early age and with his older brother, Ira, played lunchtime concerts in the school cafeteria, garnering sufficient popularity to be elected as president and vice-president respectively of their student council. By the time he left school, Ward, Ira and one of their sisters, Nina, were touring with the Ted Fio Rito Orchestra.

He studied music at the Cincinnati Conservatory, where he met his future wife, a French-born violinist, and won a Fulbright scholarship to pursue his musical studies in postwar Paris, taking lessons there with the celebrated pianist Walter Gieseking. Soon he was working as a rehearsal pianist for Roland Petit’s Ballet de Paris at a time when Petit was exploring jazz rhythms in his choreography.

Swingle’s first singing work – his voice was a mellifluous tenor – was with Blossom Dearie’s Les Blue Stars, a French vocal group whose members included Christiane Legrand, the sister of Michel Legrand, the composer. From there he joined Mimi Perrin’s Les Double Six, which won acclaim for its electronic treatment of jazz standards.

As Perrin’s health deteriorated in the early 1960s, Swingle, Legrand and other members of the group began singing privately, experimenting with jazzed-up Bach arrangements with the aim of improving their collective vocal agility. By 1962 the eight-member group was performing in public as Les Swingle Singers. Their concerts proved to be great hits with audiences, especially in Britain, and their early recordings won five Grammy awards.

By the early 1970s Swingle felt that he had exhausted the repertoire possibilities with his Parisian singers. He also wanted to experiment with other techniques, including close-mic singing. Crossing the Channel in 1973 he set up Swingle II, or the New Swingle Singers. The traditional swing music remained, but listeners were now regaled with jazz renditions from a wider selection of musical traditions, ranging from Baroque to big band. As well as looking forward, the Swingle Singers now also began looking into music’s back catalogue, releasing a disc of madrigals with a jazz twist in 1974.

Britain proved to be fertile ground. There were invitations to music festivals around the country as well as plentiful radio work. In 1982, for example, the Swingle Singers appeared in a televised concert from St. Paul Cathedral performing the sacred music of Duke Ellington with Tony Bennett, Phyllis Hyman and McHenry Boatwright.

After recording the Berio Sinfonia under the baton of Pierre Boulez in 1984, Ward Swingle stepped back from frontline singing to return to the United States. He remained the group’s musical adviser, while also running vocal workshops and publishing his many musical arrangements. He was often invited to share the techniques that he had developed for the Swingle Singers with established groups, such as the Stockholm Chamber Choir and the BBC Northern Singers.

A decade later Swingle moved back to France, and latterly was living in Britain. His book Swingle Singing, published in 1999, tells not only the history of the group, but also takes a musicological look at the techniques that he developed.

Today the Swingle Singers, now a seven-member ensemble, continue to push the boundaries of vocal music while also making recordings for television programs and films, including Sex and the City. Around seventy alumni keep in touch regularly, many of them gathering to celebrate Ward Swingle’s eightieth birthday in 2007, when the Berio was heard once again at the Proms.

He is survived by his wife, Françoise Demorest, whom he married in 1952, and by their three daughters.

Some of my favorite moments in Bach reception history come from commercial children’s recordings and films that tell his life story. I’m especially drawn to ones from the 1950s-70s that make his career trajectory map onto the postwar ideal of the “self-made man.” (This ideal has gained traction lately via Mad Men and the character Don Draper). Both Bach and Draper were orphans who grew up poor, worked their way up purely by the sweat of their brow, became breadwinning family men – all the while keeping a certain undomesticated masculinity that crops up in sexual proclivities, uncooperativeness at work, occasional stick fights, and maybe a stint in jail.

One example includes the Story of Bach LP, which was part of an enormous British series for children featuring biographies of famous historical or fictional characters (such as Beethoven, Chopin, or Rip Van Winkle). In this excerpt, C. P. E. Bach tells the story of his father J. S.’s life, including the part where he becomes an orphan and his brother Johann Christoph offers to put him up for awhile. And although the record is for children, Side B does include a brief reference to Bach’s sexuality when a church official nearly catches him “in the act” with Maria Barbara. Bach assures him not to worry, since she is a cousin. The official replies, “We’ve all heard of those kind of cousins.”

In 1970, AIMS Instructional Media Services released a film entitled Bach Is Beautiful (a play on the era’s “black is beautiful” movement) that gave a similar account of J. S.’s life. Synopsis: Bach was an orphan, had to walk thirty miles just to hear a concert, had to write out manuscripts by hand, and (lacking patrons) provided for his family only by the sweat of his brow. In the film, cartoons of Bach are interspersed with footage of 1960s listeners and performers of his music.

The story centers on a musical prodigy who is raised alone in an isolated location away from music of any kind in order to protect his compositional output from external influences. He eventually discovers Bach at age thirty, but then, when caught playing the older composer’s music by a “Watcher,” he is forbidden from ever making music again. The remainder of the story examines his attempts to repress his desire for musical expression.

Card was reluctant to option Unaccompanied Sonata, but according to Deadline, A Late Quartet convinced him that Zilberman was the perfect director for the material: “I hope I get to see the Zilberman version of Unaccompanied Sonata. It is my best story, in the hands of the only director I know of who could possibly make it live as a visual and musical experience.”

Zilberman is excited by the opportunity: “I have always loved this thrilling, poetic and thought-provoking sci-fi story. I’m eager to bring to life the fascinating maverick protagonist, as well as explore the unique sci-fi concepts central to the story.”

A divided staircase in the middle of an elegant entrance hall painted white. Crystal chandeliers, parquet floors, gold brocade-upholstered furniture, views through spacious windows of manicured lawns leading to a lake. And a baker’s half-dozen of children continually popping up to harmonize.

Picture, by contrast, a mostly unfurnished four-bedroom town house in northeast Portland, Oregon. The neighborhood is called Hollywood, which is ironic, because this is real life. The bedrooms are occupied by the real grandchildren of one of the real von Trapp children immortalized in the movie. That would be Kurt, “the incorrigible one,” whose name was actually Werner. The house is unfurnished partly because the four siblings – Sofia (known as Sofi), Melanie, Amanda and August, who range in age from twenty-five down to nineteen – haven’t lived there very long, but mostly because they use the house to rest their heads at night and eat a bowl of cereal in the morning. They spend the rest of their time doing a very Sound of Music-y thing. Singing.

They’ve been singing together since they were mere babes, and doing their public “shtick,” as Sofi calls it, for about thirteen years: most of their lives, that is.

The road to the town house in Holly­wood started with a decision made years ago by the von Trapp kids’ father, Stefan – son of Werner, grandson of Captain von Trapp (otherwise known as Christopher Plummer), step-grandson of Maria (Julie Andrews). He had grown up in Vermont with a bunch of cousins, and ultimately decided the atmosphere and the real and cinematic bloodlines were a bit oppressive. With his wife, Annie, he moved far away – to Kalispell, Montana, where he learned stonemasonry skills, opened a business, and had three girls and a boy. Werner would visit in the summer – to the kids he was always “Opa,” German for “grandpa” – and teach them the Austrian folk songs he had sung as a child. One summer he was too ill to make the trip, and the kids recorded their first homemade CD so he could hear it back in Vermont.

In 2001, the New Age pianist George Winston heard the children sing at a festival in Montana and was impressed enough to have them open for him while he was touring the state. Gradually, they began to get gigs of their own. At the start, their set list consisted of Austrian folk songs and Sound of Music selections. August, who joined his sisters when he was seven, wearing lederhosen to their dirndls, was first soprano.

Stefan had done masonry work for television-series wildlife guru Jack Hanna, who has a house in Montana, and through him became friendly with Wayne Newton, whom the kids knew from the Chevy Chase movie Vegas Vacation. Newton gave them what Amanda calls “amazing advice.”

“It was right when August’s voice was changing,” Melanie says, “and so you asked him –” Sofi picks up the story: “Somehow, I asked him how he went through his voice change. Obviously, he had such a high voice. And he said he just kept singing the high notes and he was able to keep his falsetto.” “It was good advice,” August says, “but man, it was hard. I never knew when my voice would, like explode. It was like a time bomb.”

Touring the country, the siblings began to comprehend the magnitude of the Sound of Music story, and what it meant to people. “After the show, people would come up to us and would be like, ‘I met your grandmother. . . . I heard her sing in this hall fifty years ago,’” Melanie says. “That’s when we started to kind of understand that we were carrying on something.”

“We would hear people say, ‘I saw The Sound of Music when I was six years old, and it made me realize what I was going to do with my life,’” Amanda says. “And then they would thank us for something we almost had nothing to do with. That weight of importance always rested on us. We knew it wasn’t just about ourselves.”

It may seem odd, but it’s nonetheless true that the von Trapp family was famous before The Sound of Music. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical opened on Broadway in 1959 and was based on a 1949 book, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, by Maria von Trapp. This is the same Maria played by Mary Martin on stage and Julie Andrews on screen, a postulant who was hired by Captain Georg Ritter von Trapp, a widower, as a tutor for one of his children (not a governess for all of them, as in the musical), and ended up marrying him. (That part was true.) As early as 1935, with the encouragement of and under the direction of an Austrian priest, Franz Wasner, Maria and her stepchildren formed a vocal group that performed professionally at the Salzburg Festival; in 1937 they went on a tour of Europe and even made a television appearance on the BBC.

The following year, the Nazis annexed Austria. Because the von Trapps’ former home, the city of Trieste, had become part of Italy, the family possessed Italian passports and used them to get on a train out of the country, eventually settling in the United States. (The musical’s exodus on foot over the mountains is another invention by the librettists, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse.) Within the year, accompanied by Father Wasner, they made their first tour of the United States, capped off by a well-received concert in New York’s Town Hall. The New York Times observed, “There was something unusually lovable and appealing about the modest, serious singers of this little family aggregation as they formed a close semicircle about their self-effacing director for their initial offering, the handsome Mme. von Trapp in simple black, and the youthful sisters garbed in black and white Austrian folk costumes enlivened with red ribbons. It was only natural to expect work of exceeding refinement from them, and one was not disappointed in this.”

The family lived for a time in Merion, Pennsylvania, and eventually settled in Vermont. But from the beginning, the Singers – eventually including the three children of Maria and the Captain – spent a good part of the year touring the country, offering audiences in Iowa or New Mexico exotic and ultimately heartwarming sights and sounds. In a typical concert, the family opened with sacred selections, perhaps a Gregorian chant and a Bach piece, then did an instrumental portion (recorders, spinet and viola da gamba), followed by madrigals. After intermission, they changed into their trademark Austrian outfits – dirndls for the girls, lederhosen for the boys – and did a set of Austrian folk songs, a demonstration of crowd-pleasing yodels and finally a selection of international folk songs.

Part of the appeal of the Trapp Family Singers – they judiciously dropped the “von” after settling in the United States – was the contrast they offered to happenings in their native country and neighboring Nazi Germany. The New York Times, reviewing their “picturesque” 1940 holiday Town Hall concert, commented that they “afforded the large audience a glimpse into an Austria, not of storm troopers, but of devout families who sing and make music at home in the evenings.” Feature reporters found they made good copy as well. One 1946 article reported, “In the hotel dining room, the Baroness Maria von Trapp, a tall, strong blue-eyed woman in radiant health, dressed like her daughters and like them, without make-up, firmly pressed our hand, and then introduced us to the Baron, a twinkling-eyed man who looked like Santa Claus with a mustache instead of a beard.”

The tour eventually expanded to as many as one hundred twenty-five performances a year, and according to William Anderson, author of The World of the Trapp Family, became “the most heavily booked attraction in concert history.” He doesn’t cite a source for that assertion, but with their annual tour, RCA Victor recordings, occasional television appearances and Maria’s best-selling memoir, there’s no doubt the von Trapps were a significant cultural institution.

However, by the arrival of the new decade of the ’50s, some of the siblings were marrying and having children and getting into professions like medicine and forestry, making it necessary for non-family ringers to don the dirndls and lederhosen on stage. There was also a sense, among some observers, that the act had worn a little thin. “No matter what they were up to, the Trapps did their work in a tentative, unbending manner – smiling nervously now and then – and the audience, to judge by the applause that followed each number, was pleased by this show of diffidence,” wrote Douglas Watt of the New Yorker, reviewing the 1951 Christmas concert. Watt wasn’t charmed. “There was so much gemütlichkeit in the air that it began to grow stuffy, and I left before they got to the carols.”

The group finally disbanded after a farewell tour, featuring In stiller Nacht [by Brahms], in the beginning of 1956. By that time the Captain and one of his daughters had died. Some of the siblings dispersed around the country and the world, but Maria continued to operate a ski lodge in Stowe, Vermont, and many of her children and their families were nearby. (The lodge is still operated by her son Johannes and his family. Maria died in 1987, and the last of her stepchildren, also named Maria, in 2014.)

A German film based on the family story was released in 1956, and eventually caught the attention of musical comedy star Mary Martin. She decided it would be a perfect vehicle – with Martin herself playing Maria, of course, and a score consisting of the Trapp family repertoire. She brought on a producer, Leland Hayward, commissioned the team of Lindsay and Crouse to write a script, and approached Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein (with whom she’d had a spectacular success in South Pacific) to come up with a single original song. Rodgers describes his reaction in his autobiography, Musical Stages: “If they wanted to do a play using the actual music the Trapps sang, fine, but why invite a clash of styles by simply adding one new song? Why not a fresh score? When I suggested this to Leland and Mary they said they’d love to have a new score, but only if Oscar and I wrote it.”

Write it they did. The show opened on Broadway in 1959 and was a smash hit, despite some critical carping about its sentimentality. The London production the following year was an even bigger success, and even bigger than that was the Julie Andrews film. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture and grossed a whopping $126 million at the box office.

The film has never really ended its run, of course, being presented in recent years in karaoke-style sing-alongs where audience members dress as characters and even song lyrics. (A brown paper package tied up in string is a popular choice.) In December 2013, NBC presented a live television version of the musical with Carrie Underwood as Maria. Although the reviews were, as always, mixed, the production got fabulous ratings.

The consensus among the family Trapp was that the musical got the heart of the story right, though there was and is some grumbling about that escape hike, the changing of names (and sometimes gender) of some of the siblings, and, especially, the depiction of the warm, Santa Claus-like Captain as a patrician meanie.

But none of that mattered. The film catapulted the family from renown to full-blown celebrity, and there was nothing they could do about it. From time to time, the Trapp Family Singers got out the dirndls and lederhosen and put on a reunion concert. But there was no follow-up, as everyone by that time had demanding lives.

It would not be until the 1970s that the music coursing through the von Trapp DNA would again get expressed in a concerted manner. First came Werner’s daughter Elisabeth von Trapp, who strapped a guitar on her back as a teenager and ever since has traveled the country as a folk singer.

Then came her Montana nieces and nephew. The touring and performing was fun for a while, but about four years ago, with the sisters at college age, they decided, as Sofi says, “to stop singing, and go to school, and kind of pursue our own dreams.” They each enrolled in a different college, and August started attending high school in Chicago. “It was our first time being with kids our own age,” Amanda says. (The siblings were home-schooled.) Then, in 2010, they got a call from a producer from Oprah, asking if they would appear on a special Sound of Music forty-fifth anniversary show. And how could they turn down a chance to sing Edelweiss with Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer and the rest of the surviving cast from the film?

After the show aired, there were offers from all around the world. Again, the touring started. Again, it began to wear on them. One of the last concerts on their contract came in December 2011: singing with the Oregon Symphony at Portland’s Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.

“The symphony called up and said, ‘We’ve got the von Trapps,’” recalls Thomas Lauderdale, the founder and leader of Pink Martini, who is a lifelong Portland resident. “‘Can they be on stage with you?’ And it was, you know, I mean, I just sort of flipped out, I was so excited.”

Lauderdale, who is forty-three, has spiked white-blond hair and usually wears a bow tie, had grown up as a big fan of TheSound of Music. In fact, Pink Martini performed The Lonely Goatherd, a yodeling showcase from the musical, at the second concert it ever did. When he met the von Trapps, he found himself impressed by more than their bloodlines and their pipes. “They were paying a different kind of attention than most people are ever paying,” he said. “I think it has to do with them not having watched television as kids. There’s a certain look in people who haven’t grown up watching TV. There’s a different gaze.”

Lauderdale’s perception was on target. “No, we didn’t have a TV,” Melanie says. She’s the second oldest, at twenty-four, and, like her brother and sisters, personable, fresh-faced, modest and nice. “Our dad didn’t grow up watching it, and neither of our parents were into the whole TV thing. I mean, we watched Bill Nye the Science Guy once in a while.” Later, it emerges that none of the siblings has heard of Pee-wee Herman.

Lauderdale thought their sound was terrific, too. “The way they sing comes from the way they’ve grown up together, been in the same room together all these years,” he says. “I don’t think that exists anywhere in the world, this combination of talent, experience, family history and parents with the wisdom not to park them in front of televisions. It was an amazing thing to behold.”

Then, in April 2012, Lauderdale asked them to join Pink Martini for a symphony show in Indianapolis. It was there that the idea of making an album together began to develop. “It was kind of the second time we’d really hung out with Thomas,” Amanda says, “and he slid the sheet music for Dream a Little Dream over across the table towards me. He had no way of knowing it, but that song was my lullaby growing up.”

Lauderdale had the notion that August would strum the ukulele on the song, a Tin Pan Alley standard from the early ’30s. The only trouble was, August had never played the ukulele. “At first, it was really difficult,” he says. “But eventually you just keep at it, and your fingers mold into getting used to it.”

Dream a Little Dream, with Amanda on lead vocal, Thomas on uke and Sofi on melodica, is the title track of the disc. In Stiller Nacht is on it. The rest of the lineup emerged by inspiration and serendipity. “I asked a lot of questions,” Lauderdale says. “‘Who all do you like? Who do you listen to? Who would you love to work with?’ At the top of the list was the Chieftains.” It turns out that Paddy Moloney’s venerable Irish group once shared management with Pink Martini, and the siblings journeyed to Dublin to collaborate with them on Thunder, one of three haunting New-Agey songs composed by August on the CD. (“My hope in reality,” says the lyric, “comes flowing from my dreams.”) There’s a cover of the ABBA song Fernando, Hushabye Mountain from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and carefully curated songs from China, Japan, Israel, France and Rwanda.

And how could there be a von Trapp album without including any songs from The Sound of Music? In fact, Dream a Little Dream has two, The Lonely Goatherd and Edelweiss, and a guest vocalist on both is Charmian Carr, the original “sixteen going on seventeen” Liesl. Not long after making the film, Carr moved from acting to a career as a decorator, but she never stopped participating in Sound of Music events. At a 2000 singalong at the Hollywood Bowl, she met Lauderdale. While making Dream a Little Dream, he invited Carr to participate and she accepted without hesitation. Not only did Carr feel the von Trapps’ sound was “exquisite,” she says from her home in Encino, California, but she formed a quick and deep bond. “I told them they felt like my own children,” she says.

In Portland, Amanda von Trapp says that singing with Carr was one of the high points of making the record. “Here are five people in the studio who would have no connection otherwise,” she says. “It’s so distant, but so close. She represented this story that our grandparents went through. And everybody loves this story, and her role especially, being Liesl.”

The granddaughter of the brother of the person Carr played on screen pauses. “It was a little surreal,” she adds.

Yesterday I sat with my cello in the nave of San Martín de Tours in Frómista, Spain. Located in the middle of an otherwise empty town square, this eleventh-century church is one of the purest examples of Spanish Romanesque architecture along the Camino. Plants and human figures are carved into the capitals of the columns supporting many delicate arches. Each arch seems to be in perfect proportional harmony with all the others, and the simple interior lends a feeling of quiet serenity. I had been recording there for several hours and had watched the light move across the ancient stone, worn soft and smooth by the passing of time.

I have been hiking the Camino de Santiago through Spain for two weeks now, performing Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12) every night in ancient churches along the pilgrimage route. Every church I play in is unique, not only visually and stylistically, but acoustically as well. The acoustics in San Martín were the most resonant I’ve encountered so far. As in any location, I had to adapt my playing of Bach’s music to suit the church. Sound reverberated in the space for about five seconds, so I had to slow down my tempi and breathe as much space and time into the music as possible.

Many fellow pilgrims come night after night to hear Bach’s music in the beautiful churches, and San Martín seemed to be a favorite. People expressed feelings of peace in the space, and many remarked on the church’s simplicity and the luscious acoustics. One pilgrim expressed how wonderful it was to hear the harmonies bleeding together as a result of the resonance.

While walking today, I wondered if Bach ever heard his Suites performed in a space resonant enough to produce vertical harmony from the linear harmony he composed. I feel there must have been such a space in Köthen, Germany, where he composed the solo cello and violin works.

Though the performances have been successful, the trip is not without challenges. Walking 20-30km (12-18 miles) every day is no easy feat; each time I arrive in a new town my feet and legs are aching from overuse. Producing a film and recording is a full-time job, and managing my team of eight is teaching me to anticipate and solve problems and to manage interpersonal dynamics. Choosing to perform concerts every night of this six-week journey makes for an incredible experience, but it allows little time for me to be alone with my instrument. I came to Spain understanding that the weather would be quite warm and thinking I could practice outside in the shade. But on the contrary: it has been very cold here, which not only limits my ability to practice, but it makes performing extremely difficult. The journey continues, and thankfully the weather is warming. My cello is drying out and responding more quickly, and the churches should start warming up, too.

Today I will walk 39km (24 miles) to Sahagún. After such a long day on the trail it will be wonderful to disappear into Bach’s music and forget about my sore feet.

Studio execs shopping for tent pole biopic projects in the manner of Amadeus (1984), Ghandi (1982), Lincoln (2012) and The King’s Speech (2010) at the Cannes Film Festival this year will likely stop in their tracks when they see the promotional poster for Bach, an ambitious biography of the great German composer, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750).

Embossed over the imposing painting of the composer are the words “ORPHAN CONVICT REBEL GENIUS.” Although it seems like a crass Hollywood media spin on the life of a highly revered musician who spent most of his career as a church organist and composer of religious and secular works for royalty, town counsels, church authorities and children’s choirs, JSB was indeed all those things and more, says Bach co-producer and writer, Jeffrey M. Freedman. “Bach came from a long line of highly accomplished musicians and probably would have been remembered as just another dead, great Bach if it wasn’t for several remarkable events in his life,” says Freedman.

The short list includes:

Being orphaned by the time he was ten years of age.

Chronically complaining about employers he claimed underpaid him or didn’t supply him with enough able musicians and beer, which prompted the Duke of Weimar to have him thrown in jail when he threatened to walk out on a gig.

Living larger than life in terms of several human appetites, which was partly responsible for his taking two wives, with whom he had twenty children.

Re-writing the rules of composition so that music expressed the most personal and passionate inner life of the composer.

Collaborating with the world’s first head-strong, irascible and extremely talented, cigar smoking, cursing, confrontational feminist librettist who put words to his cantatas and attended what Bach initiated as the first extemporaneous live jam sessions at taverns and cafes in Leipzig, Germany, which are still in operation today.

Co-producer S. J. Evans said from Cannes that even before Bach set up shop at the prestigious Producers Network at this year’s festival, industry reaction to the biopic has been overwhelmingly positive. “In addition to development funding by Film Agency for Wales, Warner Brothers and Universal Studios have expressed interest in the project, as well as a number of German co-producers Jeff and I have spoken with.”

Asked about the director and actor slated to play the eponymous subject of the biopic, Evans is playing those cards close to his chest. “Much like the life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which Jeffrey discovered is replete with courage, grace, tragedy, crime, bravado, passion and the expansive beauty of the life and visual canvas of J. S.Bach’s inner and outer universe, we promise the choice of director and lead will be no less spectacular and fitting of the singular artistic genius of Johann Sebastian Bach.”

One of Dane Johansen’s paternal ancestors helped oversee the transition of Alaska from czarist Russia to the United States in the late nineteenth century, and having grown up in Fairbanks as a sixth-generation resident of the Last Frontier, Johansen has been looking for a way to marry his love and knowledge of the outdoors with his career as a cellist.

He appears to have found it. This week, Johansen sets out on the Camino de Santiago, the six-hundred-mile trail in northern Spain traveled for centuries by pilgrims heading to city of Santiago de Compostela, and a road which was used for millennia before that as a path to the Fisterra peninsula, which ancient humans thought of as the literal end of the earth.

But he isn’t going as a religious pilgrim, nor is he in it just for the exercise. He’ll be bringing his cello with him – in a special extra-light, carbon-fiber case – as he walks the trail, and will stop in thirty-six churches along the way for the chief purpose of his walk: performing the six Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12) of J. S. Bach, probably the nearest thing cellists have to a sacred text.

By the end of his trip, called “The Walk to Fisterra,” at the end of June, he’ll have played each of the suites eighteen times, in the home country of Pablo Casals, the cellist who rediscovered these great three-hundred-year-old pieces in a Barcelona music shop more than a century ago and did more than anyone else to establish them in their proper place as bulwarks of the literature.

“For all cellists, the Bach cello suites are sort of a lifelong quest, or at least for any cellist who chooses to take that path. When I play Bach’s music, it’s definitely the closest I get musically to some kind of meditation or prayer-like state,” Johansen said, speaking from his home in New York. “It’s such a personal thing, playing Bach’s music. Developing an interpretation is something that happens really slowly and very naturally, because you just play them and play them and play them, and they reveal more and more of their secrets to you.”

Johansen’s trip is about sixty-five percent funded on Kickstarter (the deadline is the thirteenth), and Johansen is still working to raise more money for the expedition. He’ll be accompanied by six other people – a producer, production assistant, two videographers and two audio engineers – who will be filming his journey and recording the music for future release as a documentary and a record.

“We’ve planned thirty-six concerts along the way, and they will all be recorded in 5.1 surround sound. And we’re hoping that the recording will help listeners experience the spaces as well,” he said. “If you’re listening to the recording later, you’ll feel as though you’re in that particular venue. And with the film aspect of this project, when you hear this music in the film, you’ll be looking at the space that you’re hearing, and so you’ll kind of be transported there visually and sonically.”

Johansen, the son of a civil engineer and a violin teacher, studied in his high school and undergraduate years at The Cleveland Institute of Music, following that with a year and a half at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris, and finally getting his master’s and a performer’s certificate at The Juilliard School, where he now teaches as an assistant to the eminent American cellist Joel Krosnick and in the school’s pre-college division.

Johansen is also the cellist in the young Escher String Quartet, which will be releasing discs this year of the complete Mendelssohn quartets (on BIS, the Swedish label), and the four quartets of the Mahler acolyte Alexander von Zemlinsky (on Naxos).

On his own, Johansen performed Elliott Carter’s Cello Concerto for his Lincoln Center debut in 2008, and in 2011, gave the New York premiere of the Crouching Tiger Concerto compiled by Chinese composer Tan Dun from his score for the 2000 Ang Lee film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In addition to his global appearances with the Escher String Quartet, he has performed in elite series such as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Marlboro Music Festival of Vermont.

Johansen said he first came up with the idea for the walk in 2008, thinking he would walk the trail with his cello by himself. He had gotten the inspiration from a composer friend who had walked the Appalachian Trail and had written a good deal of music while on the journey.

But the Appalachian Trail is largely wilderness, and while that was fine for the solitary occupation of composing, Johansen wanted to make a Bach journey on a more populated route. Taking the Camino de Santiago not only puts him in the same steps as the pilgrims who began using it in earnest in the early twelfth century, it also allows him to reach out to any number of contemporaries who happen to be there, and not only the young musicians from four Spanish conservatories with whom he’ll be doing some educational outreach on the trip.

“Everybody who walks the Camino walks that route with their own story and for their own reasons,” said Johansen, who will turn thirty in June while he’s on the road. “And I think that this music will help elevate their experience. Whatever their reason for walking the Camino, I think that there will be people sharing that experience with me that will be happier for the music, and who will enjoy their experience more for the music,” he said.

Johansen, who has been breaking in his Vasque hiking boots for the past few weeks, will be staying each night of the six-week journey in one of the many refugios on the path, though he added that some members of the production team may have to stay elsewhere from time to time for technical duties such as data downloads. His cello case, made by Germany’s Musilia, is a special reflective white to keep the heat to a minimum for his custom cello, built for him in 2011 by the New York-based luthier Stefan Valcuha.

Johansen said the origin of the Bach suites themselves are as shrouded in mystery as the pre-pilgrimage Camino. Most scholars believe the music to have been written before 1720, but the original manuscript is lost, and while the first five suites were written for the cello, the sixth one was written for a related five-string instrument of uncertain specificity. That doesn’t change the power of the music, which Johansen says he never tires of.

“When people ask me what my desert island book of music would be, it’s always the Bach suites because I never get tired of them,” he said. “I play them every day – not all of them every day – but I play Bach’s music every day, and I never get sick of it.”

His current favorite of the suites is the fifth one (BWV 1011), and he says the sarabandes of each of the suites are their spiritual centers.

“What he’s writing is at once really complex but also very simple . . . I like to try to figure out what was the idea that Bach was playing with in this movement. It seems to me that most of the movements have kind of a central concept that he must have been playing with. It could be something as simple as up and down, or stop and start, or push and pull.

“So I like to approach them in that way: What could he have been thinking with this material? What is this about?” he said. “I really don’t try to make them my own, because just by playing them, they’re my own . . . Every time I play them, I experience them as a new thing, like it’s the first time, and that’s something really special, something I don’t experience with any other composer or any other canon of music.”

Bringing something of that artistic journey to a completely new audience is vital not only for the Camino walk, but for being a performer in general, he said.

“I think as an artist when you’re taking on any kind of project, you have to make sure that your focus is outward, and that you’re trying to do something good for the world with your project,” Johansen said. “It’s ridiculous to say that an artistic project is not about the artist, because it’s impossible. You’re not going to have a meaningful product, or a meaningful experience, if someone hasn’t invested all of themselves.

“But the focus of all that energy can’t be inward. It has to be outward, and for me, that’s sharing this music with as many people as I can.”

A Rubik’s cube can be twisted and twiddled in 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 different ways, and 43,252,003,274,489,855,999 of them are wrong. Those truths – especially the second, maddeningly frustrating one – have been known since soon after the modish, Mondrianish plastic object was invented in 1974. The cube went on to become the must-have toy of 1980 and 1981.

Its popularity faded fast.

By 1982, the cube was so last year, doomed to Hula-Hoop faddishness. In 1986, The New York Times said the cube had been “retired to the attic, the garbage heap and, with a bow to its elegance and ingeniousness, to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.” Lately it has undergone a resurrection in a world in which engineers and computers can generate helpful algorithms that would-be cube solvers can share with each other. But some things have not changed. The typical Rubik’s cube still has nine squares on six sides, and the same eye-popping colors. And those unfathomable huge numbers in the first paragraph are still quintillions. “Four-point-three times ten to the nineteenth,” explained Paul Hoffman, the president and chief executive of the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City.

Rubik’s cubes have trailed Mr. Hoffman for his entire career. On his first job after college, as an editor at Scientific American, he shepherded a March 1981 cover story about Rubik’s “magic cubology” into print. It was written by Douglas R. Hofstadter, the professor known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller Gödel, Escher, Bach, who said it had taken him “fifty hours of work, distributed over several months,” to solve the “unscrambling problem.” He mentioned group theory, which has to do with algebraic structures, and something he called “cubitis magikia,” a “highly contagious” condition “accompanied by the itching of the fingertips that can be relieved only by prolonged contact” with a certain multicolored object.

Now Mr. Hoffman is capitalizing on the cube again, with a $5 million exhibition that opened to the public on 26 April 2014. It features an eighteen-karat gold Rubik’s cube said to be worth $2.5 million that pivots and swivels like an ordinary plastic one, and a cube-solving robot that is no match for speed cubers, as competitors who try to beat the clock are known. It took the machine a minute to unscramble a jumbled cube. In that time, Anthony Brooks, a speed cuber with several records to his name, did it three times, once using only one hand.

Speed cubers can memorize algorithms they have developed on their laptops and shared on websites or by email to unscramble a jumbled cube in less time than it takes to read a sentence like this one aloud. But Mr. Brooks said speed cubing also involved muscle memory and tricks, like breaking in a cube the way baseball players break in a glove with neatsfoot oil.“You can buy lubricants – cube lubes,” Mr. Brooks said. “Or regular silicon spray you can find in any hardware.”

In the forty years since it was invented, the cube has made some intriguing cameo appearances. Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has leaked intelligence secrets, told two journalists he had arranged to meet that they would recognize him outside a restaurant in Hong Kong because he would have a Rubik’s cube in his hand. Mr. Hoffman said that sounded like an homage to the 2009 film Duplicity, in which spies played by Julia Roberts and Clive Owen realize who they are because they are both carrying Rubik’s cube key chains.

That could not have happened to the cube’s inventor, Ernő Rubik, 69. He said he did not travel with a cube. “I don’t need to,” Mr. Rubik said as he previewed the exhibition this week.

For the record, he calls it “my cube.” “From my mouth, it sounds strange to call it ‘Rubik’s cube,’ ” Mr. Rubik said. “If I have a child, I call it ‘my child,’ not ‘Rubik’s boy’ or ‘Rubik’s girl.’ Naturally, after forty years, I have a strong relationship with my cube.”

He passed a display case containing his original pride and joy, a wooden cube. It sat in front of the Hungarian patent he was issued for his “magic cube” in 1975. He invented the cube as the solution to the kind of structural problem that could bedevil an architecture professor, which is what he was at the time. The structural problem was how to keep a mechanism with many moving parts from tumbling to the floor.

Do not expect him to face off against a speed cuber like Rowe Hessler, a bowling-alley manager from Riverhead, NY. Mr. Hessler, 23, is a former United States speed cubing champion, whose fastest time unscrambling a standard three-by-three-by-three cube was 6.94 seconds. At the science center, Mr. Hessler did it in a seemingly effortless 9.69 seconds of twisting and pivoting. The only noise was the cube, clicking like bad dentures in a cartoon.

Mr. Rubik said he had not imagined when the ink on the patent was fresh that the cube would become so universal. “I had a feeling about the intellectual value of the cube” early on, he said, adding that items with intellectual value can be a hard sell in a material world. Mr. Rubik said he had thought that toy manufacturers would pigeonhole it as a puzzle. “Traditionally, the puzzle section in the toy business is very narrow,” he said, “and they don’t believe it’s possible to make a business. They’re not selling mass production.” He said the cube had changed that thinking.

Mr. Hoffman said one billion to 2.5 billion cubes had been manufactured, assuming there were five counterfeits for every legitimate one sold. “They’ve seized whole 747s full of illegal knockoffs,” he said.

Experts have calculated that a cube could be solved in as few as twenty moves, no matter how it is scrambled. But speed cubers do not have time to think about the elegance of economy implied by minimizing moves. Mr. Hessler said speed cubers averaged about fifty; his lowest was thirty-one. For his part, Mr. Rubik declined an invitation to go up against Mr. Hessler, but he said he understood the appeal of speed cubing, even if it was not the sport for him. “The main group who is buying the cube is teenagers,” Mr. Rubik said, “and they are competitive and they have the time. When you are working, you don’t have the time.”